@bluppfisk

Good points all!

Lit road signs at night are pretty essential if you travel at more than 40kph.
Unless you mean lit advertising hoardings.

Although lit streets waste energy, as long as people continue to drive or ride without lights, they too are important.
IMHO

@geogramatt

We are on the same page, but sadly rushed development (usually to meet political ends) changes what can happen.

I know where you are coming from with urbanisation. In an ideal world I agree with you. But TIC.
In many developing cities the usual case of non-joined up government means that unless the infrastructure goes in first, this safe development cannot happen.
This new development usually requires green field sites. Brown field development, usually (not always) means that a redeveloped city block still needs to plug into the surrounding ancient infrastructure.

We recently had complaints from a poster on here, about lack of water supply for most of the week. This is perhaps dues to new development on old infrastructure. In the last city I lived in, we lived in an new area with inadequate infrastructure, we lost water for up to a week at a time every 3 months or so. This lack of mains water affects sanitation.

I also agree with you on population density figures, I did not want to post too long, and skipped the issue of local areas of more density. In the last city I lived in the most densely populated area was 38000/km2. Like most statistics, there is room for more detail.

@tigertiger I bet they waste less energy than lit street signs in my country. In my country, spotlights mounted at the base of the street sign illuminate the entire sign. These new ones in Kunming only illuminate the text. I'm guessing they're LED-lit. Not only more energy efficient, but very cool-looking.

@tigertiger

The newly lit road signs are along the first ring road. The characters are actually backlit led, which makes for a very readable and pleasing effect.

I must admit, this is quite progressive as I haven't seen many other cities incorporate these yet. However, it's just a paltry number of signs.

@Alex,

I haven't seen them yet, as I have just returned after a long spell away. I would imagine that they are indeed LED. These are also usually dual intensity, they are less bright after dark so that people are not dazzled.

LEDs burn less energy, and should last for many 10s ths of hours, but as they are very low voltage the transformers used to generate a lot of heat and the transformers used to fail. As I see more of these LED signs around the world I am assuming that the systems are now more reliable. If this is the case we will see lot more of them, a good thing IMHO.

I only wish reliable LED technology was available for domestic use at an affordable price, LEDs cost only about a cent to produce. LEDs don't contain the toxins of low energy lamps, and last longer.

I personally think that the Green Lake beautification project was a smashing success. That park is really lovely now!

The airport may be completed but the toilets still need to be cleaned...